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Yeah, I’m a bit behind here. And rather than try and write detailed posts for everything I’ve done since January, I’m just dumping a bunch of pics and one liners about each item and if anyone wants a recipe let me know and I’ll provide the link, this way I can start fresh going forward into holiday baking season!

Is anyone listening to me (if peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis). And I just lost my last reader to that somewhat obscure reference.

Here goes (and not even necessarily in chronological order because lord knows how my computer decided what order to load these)…

1. Spritz Redux: We remade the spritz that got jacked in the prior post for New Year’s Eve. Made in yellow with gold sprinkles. The 4 year old (at the time) was super excited about a cookie gun. Sigh.

2. Chocolate cream pie – this was for New Year’s Eve too. It was awesome.

3. I don’t even remember what I made these for but I think they were cake batter cookies. They were good.

4. Superbowl Sunday football cupcakes. Nothing special, just chocolate cupcakes but frosted in football shapes.

5. Valentine’s Day sugar cookies with my makeshift royal icing (I never have meringue powder on hand and am too squeamish for raw eggs so I usually just mix milk and powdered sugar). We used these for teacher gifts for preschool.

6. Valentine’s Brownie Pops. Red velvet brownies cut into heart shapes, frosted with buttercream then shoved onto sticks. Except they were too heavy/dense to keep on the sticks and would roll over as soon as you picked them up. Tasted good though!

7. St. Patrick’s Day thumbprint cookies. Just your typical chocolate cookies with hershey’s kisses, we just made them holiday appropriate with green sprinkles. I actually found them pretty blah.

8. Chocolate chip cookie dough pie. The crust is a giant cookie. YES.

9. Chocolate cake with salted caramel buttercream. OMG this frosting. I can’t share these recipes because they were from a dear friend who owns a bakery in California and is sweet enough to share recipes with me to use for the birthday of our twins we lost to prematurity. But this cake and frosting especially was AMAZING.

10. Passover macaroons. Nothing special/fancy about these but we liked them. They’re not burnt, the bottoms are dipped in chocolate.

11. Matzo crack. Like Christmas crack but made with matzo. I used sliced almonds for the topping.

12. Easter cookies to follow Passover. Yeah, we’re confused. Just regular sugar cookies with royal icing but I got meringue powder and made real royal icing this time. It was a pain in the ass.

13. Easter nest carrot cake cupcakes. These were all about presentation but also yummy! We brought them for Easter brunch at our best friends’ house.

14. Purple cake. This was just a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream, purple because it was the day of our annual March of Dimes March for Babies (and their trademark color is purple).

15. Pumpkin whoopie pies. These are from just a week ago. I intended to just make soft pumpkin cookies and ice them but they were so cake like they reminded me of whoopie pies so I found a cream cheese frosting recipe and sandwiched them. BIG hit.

17. Tart cherry cobbler. We stupidly signed up for a fruit/veggie CSA this summer (stupidly because we don’t have time to cook all the obscure things they sent and the kids wouldn’t touch most of it). But we did get nice fruit for baking. I had helpers.

I won’t share the full details since I’ve made and blogged this before, but just in case anyone thought I no longer had the more than minor mishaps, may I present Ex-spritz-it A:

I think it was a combination of being on too low a rack in the oven and that for some reason the recipe I’d printed last year said 12-15 mins baking when it really should have been 8-10 (as I found when I googled and found another blog with the same recipe). Not sure why last year they were fine but whatever.

white chocolate chips (or white Candiquik which we used and worked just fine).

canned pumpkin puree

cream cheese, softened

gingersnap cookie crumbs (I beat the crap out of them in a ziploc).

graham cracker crumbs (see note above re: crap, beating out of)

powdered sugar

orange zest (I skipped this – not worth the effort)

ground cinnamon

Pinch of salt

Pretty much melt a bit of the white chocolate mix that melted portion with everything else other than a small amount of graham cracker crumbs set aside, put in fridge to set, roll into balls, dip in remaining melted white chocolate and sprinkle remaining crumbs atop.

This one was for my mom’s (aka “Gammy”) birthday. Wanted cupcakes, something fun, and summery as it was mid July. Found a perfect recipe here, relatively easy too as kids wanted to help bake for Gammy.

I found this recipe on numerous sites just googling to see if I could locate it (including here and here) so here it is reproduced.

Ingredients:

1 white cake mix

1 (3 oz) box of strawberry gelatin

2/3 cup canola oil

1/2 cup of frozen sliced strawberries in syrup, thawed

1/2 cup water

4 eggs

Make cake mix as directed but add the jello to the dry mix before doing the rest, and as the last step add cut up strawberries ( I used fresh, no syrup). Bake as directed for the most part (at 350 for about 16-18 minutes). I then used cream cheese frosting instead of the one with the recipes. Typical recipe – I used 4 oz. (half package) softened cream cheese, 4 oz (1 stick) butter, softened, 2 cups powdered sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract. Mix all together, pipe onto cupcakes.

Then, because I like things pretty, I sliced strawberries and topped each cupcake with a sliver.

I was a big fan of this one. Made it for our friends’ birthday dinner. I searched a lot online for a recipe that sounded right to me and finally settled on this one from “Alaska from Scratch“.

Ingredients (see source for specifics):

cake flour

baking powder

baking soda

salt

butter, lightly softened

sugar

eggs

fresh key lime juice (easier said than done without a juicer/squeezer. I may have squeezed the shit out of a few limes manually).

key lime zest

green food coloring gel (I used Wilton Leaf Green)

buttermilk

I’ll skip the instructions which can be found from the source, but it was relatively straightforward. I used a generic cream cheese frosting recipe online vs. the one at the source blog, and frosted only the top with the sides visible. Then I cut a few lime slices and twisted them as decoration. It was DELICIOUS and pretty. Win/Win.

It took me a while to even remember where I found this recipe or what exactly it was, until I went and looked at my Pinterest. Recipe from this blog. I think they were to take to a friend’s house for dinner and I had limited time so wanted something based on a mix but still somewhat unique/homemade.

Ingredients are easy and mostly stuff we’d have around anyways:

1 pkg. lemon cake mix

vegetable oil

eggs

8 oz. pkg cream cheese

lemon juice

sugar

And easy to do too. Combine cake mix, oil and egg until crumbly. Set aside 1 cup, put the rest in a pan and pat down to form a crust. Bake, put the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and whip, spread over rust and crumble remaining crumbs atop, bake again (see source blog for more specifics). They were yummy!